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Comment by RasputinsBro | Hacker News Reader

I would rather own all of Bitcoin.

I'd sell it tomorrow and make about $1bn in profit and move on with my life.

EDIT: I'm editing this because people are missing the point. My point wasn't about how when 1 owner has absolute control BTC is worthless like this guy[1] seems to think or about the liquidity of BTC, like this guy[2] seems to think. My point was about the fact that the difference between BTC is that the only use it has is holding and hoping it moves up, whereas owning a company actually brings in earnings.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=code-is-code

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jawilson2

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If you, a single person, owns all bitcoin, noone would buy a single satoshi from you.

Ok, I would own 1/4 of all bitcoin and make only $250m profit tomorrow.

Happy? Do you miss the forest for the trees a lot, or only when you're on HN?

You seem to be someone who’s not aware of how thin the liquidity is in crypto markets.

Thank you. Is there an economics term or ratio or something that encapsulates this?

In my mind, it's conceptually similar to elastic/inelastic demand curves.

24 hour volume was $1.25 billion USD. Is that thin for a $250m dump?

That isn't how supply and demand and market liquidity works.

This is why institutional traders have to break up buys or sells over many transactions. If you put up a huge block saying "I want to buy/sell $X million / Y million units of instrument Z" it is going to strongly drive the market away from your bid/ask. In a market like BTC, it might drive the price down 50% within minutes.

In other words, who is going to be on the other side of your market? If you are selling 1000 BTC, and if the top bid price has a quantity of 0.1 BTC, you will blow through the first level, then the second, thrid, etc, through dozens of decreasing price levels, if you are doing market orders. You will take out the ENTIRE BUY SIDE OF THE MARKET, and the price of your last transaction will be thousands of dollars lower than the first price. If you are doing a limit order, then you provide the lowest price you are willing to go, so you might only be able to sell a few coins.

You would probably have more success selling off 25% of goldman sachs than 25% of all bitcoin.

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